Analysing cloud adoption across industry verticals, the banking and financial industry is as good a yardstick as any to assess progress due to its stringent data security requirements. A new report from CipherCloud shows financial firms have an increased confidence in cloud technologies; 100% of respondents said they put certain personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud.

This does not extend to all PII however – only one in three respondents said they use the cloud...

Worldwide, there's a growing appreciation for the many benefits of the open dource way. Clearly, being truly open is a frame of mind that can apply to just about anything in life - including the development and nurture of a progressive company culture that's equipped for the challenges and opportunities of today's Global Networked Economy.Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, recently launched his new book entitled "

Meet Springs.io. This container-based cloud infrastructure provider claims to offer the first pure-play container cloud service in the UK.

The company builds upon the auto-scaling Linux container technology from hosting provider ElasticHosts, whose CEO, Richard Davies, is the founder of Springs.io. One of the key facets of cloud computing is the ability to ‘pay as you go’ – but Davies argues this can be taken one step further. With billing based on actual usage rather...

Once again, the tea leaves and crystal balls are out at Gartner headquarters as the analyst house looks to predict the shape of the enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) industry. Accellion, Box, Citrix and Syncplicity occupy the top right leaders section in this iteration, while Microsoft, Google and – perhaps surprisingly – Dropbox again sits in the challengers square.

The revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google in cloud infrastructure services commands more than half of the worldwide market, according to new data from Synergy Research.

The figures reveal the combined market share of the ‘big four’ at 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, comparing favourably with Q214 (46%) and Q213 (41%). AWS holds a 29% market share at the top, with each of the big four cloud providers increasing their share of the...

Microsoft has reported a $3.2 billion net loss for the second quarter of 2015, the worst in the company’s history, but backed it up alongside continued strong cloud growth.

It was always going to look nasty. Following the $7.5bn writedown of its Nokia offshoot, the analysts were prepared to sink their teeth into the Redmond giant as its latest financial results came through. Yet Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was unrepentant, arguing the cloud and mobile gains were pushing the...

Cloud technology is one of the most secure ways to store and share data that the world has ever seen. But with data security making the headlines with increasing frequency you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. High profile hackings have at times derailed the industry’s attempts to make the case for the cloud.

Keeping data secure is not a new challenge, however. Businesses have been grappling to protect their data for decades; be it from missing paper files or...

As Tour de France fever ratchets up around the world, it’s clear to me that businesses can draw several parallels with professional cycling and their disaster recovery (DR) strategy. If businesses and cyclists plan ahead, it’s possible for both to have a real-time support crew on hand the moment something goes wrong. And, just seconds after it goes wrong, the support crew solves the problem and the cyclist, or business, gets back to what it does best.

It’s that time of year again. Companies are issuing their latest quarterly financial figures, and SAP’s Q215 numbers see continued growth in cloud services, but overall profits remaining relatively stagnant.

Cloud subscriptions and support for the German software giant stood at €552 million for the second quarter of 2015, a more than 100% change from the previous year. Other software licenses and support saw a 13% change at €3.51 billion. Total revenue hit...

Disasters can strike at any time. They may be caused by human error, cyber-attacks or by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods and hurricanes. Even so it’s quite tempting to sit back and relax, to not worry about the consequences of these upon one’s business – perhaps for cost reasons, but investments in business continuity are like an insurance policy. It’s not just about disaster recovery because the best way to prevent...

Today, many UK-based organisations face a significant set of data sovereignty challenges when they are considering moving their data to the cloud. Data residency and privacy rules and regulations differ from country to country, so users of cloud services need to think about the rules that cover each of the jurisdictions they operate in, as well as the rules that govern the treatment of data at the places where cloud service providers store their data. There are various merits of...

Google has unveiled itself as the newest corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, promising to commit engineering resources and further collaborate on technologies such as app catalogue Murano and API service Magnum.

Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, wrote in a blog post announcing the news: “Few companies understand cloud-native apps at scale like Google, so I expect big things as Google developers contribute to OpenStack projects like...

Figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) reveal more than half (51%) of organisations polled with between 21 and 200 employees and almost three quarters (72%) of firms with more than 200 employees are still reliant on Windows Server 2003, despite the support from Microsoft having expired on July 14.

Naturally, this may not be the most surprising news you will read today. Back in April, this publication spoke with hybrid IT provider Zynstra and cloud storage provider CTERA Networks and concluded...

Analysis If we think about the basic functionality that we take advantage of in the cloud, a whole set of possibilities open up for how we plan for disaster recovery (DR).

Until recently, disaster recovery was an expensive, process intensive service, reserved for only the most critical of corporate services. In most cases DR has been about large servers in two geographically distributed location and large data sets being replicated on a timed basis. Many smaller or less critical services were...

While security is always a top priority during the initial build phase of a cloud project, over time security tends to slip. As systems evolve, stacks change, and engineers come and go, it’s very easy to end up with a mash-up of legacy and cloud security policies piled on top of custom code that only a few engineers know how to work with.

Rackspace has announced it has expanded its service offering with Microsoft, working with customers to speed up their deployment of Azure cloud services.

The two companies are unveiling a self-service hybrid solution utilising Rackspace’s private cloud powered by Microsoft Cloud Platform. The two companies, who have enjoyed a 13 year partnership, will aim to minimise costs and optimise performance with its feted fanatical support, offering a 100% network uptime...

If organisations could track all cloud consumption and usage across the enterprise, the majority (57%) would utilise it to improve IT forecasting.

That was the key takeaway from a survey undertaken by enterprise software provider Cloud Cruiser, who collared 279 IT professionals at the recent Microsoft Ignite event in Chicago. Interestingly, 16% of respondents admitted they did not use Microsoft cloud technologies.

39% of those polled said they would use more wide-ranging tracking skills...

A report from enterprise mobile collaboration provider harmon.ie argues Microsoft is making progress in moving its customers’ productivity software to the mobile cloud, yet on premise remains important.

The company, which offers a tool which puts all Microsoft productivity tools within a single screen, notes Microsoft has a stronghold on productivity suites. 97% of respondents polled said they expect their clients’ use of Office 365 to increase in the coming 12 months,...

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